Morning after Rain

Morning after Rain (雨後之朝, Uki no Asa) is a 1937 hanging-scroll painting by Hashimoto Kansetsu in ink and color on silk, in the collection of the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane. The painting belongs to the strand of quiet seasonal landscape and rural-life work that Kansetsu pursued throughout the 1930s alongside his more famous Chinese-themed paintings, and it is built on a classical Japanese poetic theme: the morning that follows a night of rain, when the air is clean, the leaves heavy with water, and the world reset into freshness. The seasonal vocabulary descends from centuries of Japanese poetry on uki (rain after), and Kansetsu's treatment combines that lyric tradition with the close observation of weather effects he had absorbed from his Maruyama-Shijō training under Takeuchi Seihō. The painting is one of several Kansetsu landscape works in the Adachi Museum, which holds one of the most important collections of Taishō and Shōwa nihonga in Japan.